The Western Press was gasping in horror when the Glorious People’s Republic of Best Korea announced that it had increased the numbers of soldiers in its cyber army.

Apparently, Kim Jong Un has recruited an army of 6,000 troops and is working to cause "physical and psychological paralysis" in the South and to publish America for daring to impose sanctions upon it.

The numbers do not come from Kim but the South Korean Defence Ministry which says it is double Seoul's estimate for the force in 2013. To put this figure into some perspective. The Scottish Army had 6,000 troops when it defeated the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1298 and 6000 French soldiers under Count de Rochambeau helped the American terrorists overthrow their lawful king in 1776.

This is a huge number and you can see the damage that North Korea has already done with the Sony hack that it may or may not have been involved with.However firstly the South Koreans have ample reason to encourage the fear of Kim in their US allies so they might be cooking the books previously it has been claimed that Best Korea has 1,800 “highly trained” hackers.

The internet footprint of North Korea has not changed and is still the same size as the Falkland Islands. One would also have expected that if Best Korea had increased its cyber army by four or five times we would expect to see more attacks.

The hey-day for North Korean attacks was 2013; South Korea blamed the North for crippling cyber-attacks that froze the computer systems of its banks and broadcasters for days. The Sony hack was well done, but not as crippling.

Apparently he forgot that he actually had caved into the hackers and pulled the movie slighting the North Korean leader Kim Jong and did exactly what it was told.In his first public comments on the massive cyberattack, which the U.S. government has blamed on North Korea, Hirai said current and former employees of the studio were "the victims of one of the most vicious and malicious cyberattacks we have known in recent history."

"Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are... lifelines of Sony and our entertainment business," Hirai said with a straight face during a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

He also thanked those who had seen the movie, which on the face of it was pretty rubbish and not worth hacking anything for, but since most of the people who saw it would have got it from Pirate Bay we were surprised.

Hirai initially cancelled the release of "The Interview" after hackers threatened theatres. This move was slammed by President Barack Obama and Hollywood celebrities. It turned out to be a turkey anyway and has yet to recoup the up to $88 million it spent on marketing and production.

At CES, Sony showcased a new line-up of high definition TVs and said it would start selling a stainless steel version of its wearable SmartWatch 3 from February. The company did not make major announcements on its Xperia smartphones, which have been lagging Apple and Samsung in sales and are facing increasing pressure from Chinese rivals including Xiaomi.

Sony Entertainment decided to release The Interview yesterday, pushing it out on several online platforms in North America. As expected, the movie quickly ended up on torrent sites.

Within hours the film was downloaded more than 200,000 times and it’s hard to say how many people downloaded it since then. The movie got a lot of publicity thanks to the Sony hack, so the interest isn’t exactly unexpected, but the sad truth is that Kim Jong Un’s regime was right about one thing – Sony really did make a terrible movie.

While IMDB visitors gave the movie stunning score of 8.7, proper movie critics were somewhat more realistic – Slant Magazine gave it 1.5 out of 5 stars, while iheardthatmoviewas.com gave it a generous 2 out of 5.

However, now that it at a centre of a hacking scandal involving one of the biggest entertainment companies and the most isolated country on the planet, people will flock to see it. While it seems like it’s investing in cyber-warfare, North Korea also has to learn a bit more about internet culture – namely a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect.

As the fallout form the Sony hack starts to get silly, with the studios lobbying the US to go to war with North Korea – or something like that – the US government has asked China for help.

A US government spokesman said that the US had discussed this issue with the Chinese to share information, express our concerns about this attack, and to ask for their cooperation. In our cybersecurity discussions, both China and the United States have expressed the view that conducting destructive attacks in cyberspace is outside the norms of appropriate cyber behaviour.

Yeah, we said something similar to what you are thinking.

North Korea's Internet traffic goes through China. President Barack Obama said Friday, "We've got no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country."

On Saturday, the Guardians of Peace, a group of hackers accused of performing the cyberattack on Sony Pictures, mocked the FBI in a new statement.

"The result of investigation by FBI is so excellent that you might have seen what we were doing with your own eye.. We congratulate you (sic) success. FBI is the BEST in the world. You will find the gift for FBI at the following address. Enjoy!"

The hackers broke into Sony's servers, published private emails and information, and threatened to attack movie theatres screening "The Interview," a comedy film about an assassination plot on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

US Imperialist law enforcement think it unlikely that that glorious North Korean cyber warriors’ were behind the righteous hack of Sony servers.

It is widely credited that Kim Jong-un personally hacked Sony systems, ably aided by his hand-picked teams of hackers. Kim was mortified by a Sony movie which was based around an assassination plot against him.

However a senior FBI official said on Tuesday that the agency has not confirmed widely held suspicions that North Korea is behind the unprecedented cyber-attack on Sony's Hollywood studio.

"There is no attribution to North Korea at this point," Joe Demarest, assistant director with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyber division, said while speaking on a panel at a cybersecurity conference sponsored by Bloomberg Government.

Cybersecurity researchers who have analyzed the malicious software used in the attack say that technical indicators suggest North Korean hackers launched the attack. People close to separate investigations being conducted by Sony and the government have told Reuters that North Korea is a principal suspect, yet a North Korean diplomat has denied that his nation is involved.

Hackers stole vast quantities of data, then used malicious software to wipe data on computers, shutting down much of the Sony unit's network for more than a week.

Linux is supposed to be all about freedom, so it doesn’t exactly have much in common with North Korea. However, the totalitarian hermit kingdom has its own Linux release for the proletariat and now it got a fresh new look.

According to Electronista, the new Red Star OS ditches the look and feel of Windows and adopts an OS X look. It appears that the Windows 8 UI was a bit too much even for North Korea.

Of course, the OS doesn’t allow people to access the internet, because they may be surprised to learn a thing or two about the Juche hunta ruling the country. It does, however, allow access to the country’s tiny intranet, which is used by a handful of local institutions. It also has a web browser called “Naenara” (My Country) and if you have any privacy concerns, or prefer not to spend the rest of your life in a concentration camp, it’s probably not a good idea to use it too much.

Still, it is rather nice to see North Korea was able to overcome political differences and join South Korean companies in ripping off Apple’s UI designs.

You can check out a screenshot gallery here. Rumour has it that the OS was developed using a MacBook Air left behind in North Korea by American diplomat Dennis Rodman. Actually we made that bit up, but we are talking about North Korea, a country famous for inventing the past, present and future, much like a certain ministry in Orwell’s 1984.

North Korea has officially launched its first tablet and although not exactly a gamechanger, at least it’s not the kind of launch we’ve grown to expect from the communist hermit kingdom.

Dubbed the “Achim”, the device is a 7-inch tablet that translates to “morning”. It weighs 300 grams and runs up to 5 hours on a single charge.

Although the rest of the features cannot be confirmed with certainty at the moment, it is said that Achim is running on Red Star, North Korean proprietary Linux distribution. Yup, we’re talking about a closed off open-source OS. A techsymoron anyone?

As you’d expect, the tablets are restricted to domestic intranet and the educational material contained within. Additionally, the Achim comes filled with videos glorifying the Party and leader Kim Jong-un, so it’s a full package.

The Achim is said to be aimed at school children but has apparently gained in popularity with students. It is available in standard and bog-standard versions. Just kidding, it’s the same one for everyone.

Unless you want to be part of North Korea's propaganda campaign it might not be a good idea to follow @uriminzok on Twitter.

Dear Leader has apparently ordered his glorious communist legions to step up a propaganda campaign on the social notworking site, Twitter. The outfit has been recently seen trying to get its glorious videos onto YouTube.

The twitter name is a reference to the country's official website (http://www.uriminzokkiri.com). South Korea blocks the site and few in North Korea have access even to a computer. One tweet dismissed accusations that a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March and another slammed US-led sanctions on North Korea and Iran. Followers are free to slag off the US and the west in Korean.

North Korea operates an army of elite hackers, well elite in comparison to say the UK. In fact many of them are working on PCs so primitive that they were designed to paint pictures of bison in caves using a primitive dot matrix system.